On Monday 30 March 2026 at 18:27 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a tax authority portal customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 249.5 Gbps and lasted 129 minutes. Traffic originated from 3552 autonomous systems in 38 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 249.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 129 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.760 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.014% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.27% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 31 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.